Customer Case Study

Canadian national railway CN Rides Data Warehouse Automation to Better Customer Service and Safety

About Canadian National Railway Company (CN)

CN, headquartered in , Quebec, serves and the Midwestern and Southern United States. The company is the largest railway in Canada, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network. Today CN owns and maintains more than 20,000 route miles of track and employs approximately 22,000 people.

WhereScape talked with Business Intelligence Manager Alain Bond about the revamp of CN’s BI strategy to better and faster serve its vast and diverse user community. Bond has 24 years of IT experience, the second half being focused in the BI domain, where he led BI teams in the insurance, banking and transportation industries. He currently manages a team of 55 data architects, modelers, developers and practitioners.

Bond discusses how the company’s increasing use of GIS and sensors is exploding the amount of data the company needs to manage and analyze. Bond also discusses how WhereScape RED’s automated and iterative rapid prototyping capabilities are providing a revolutionary game changing approach to CN development as the company strives to better customer service and safety.

Would you please highlight CNs’ BI infrastructure?

We are a large SAP shop where a lot of our ERP resides. We also have very large SAP BW footprint, with more than 160 cubes, most of them fnancial as well as mechanical and engineering data that tracks items like repair incidents as well as HR data. A large portion of our legacy data warehouse resides on IBM DB2 with COBOL as ETL. In the mid- 90s, we added Oracle databases targeting additional measures, while in the mid-2000s we added Netezza which serves as our enterprise data warehouse with IBM InfoSphere DataStage as ETL.

www.wherescape.com - 1 - Customer Case Study

Business Objects remains our predominant solutions to the business faster than IT typically front-end tool, with 3,500 supported users and delivers. While fostering the concept of governed an average of 2,000 users per month on the self-service and empowering our power users with system. We also have 20 Tableau licenses, a few even more effcient ways of being autonomous Qlik licenses and we currently use R for our data doing data discovery, we should also have an scientists. “alternate development path” within IT for discovery purposes which should not be a slow The GIS group within the BI organization is and procedural process requiring tons of upfront expanding exponentially, growing from a staff of documents and analysis before even showing any three to thirty in the past three years. The group glimpse of value to our end users. generates massive amounts of data, and as a result more and more data sources need to be integrated. I understand you have started We recently implemented Oracle Exadata to handle the GIS side of the business. a predictive analytics initiative. What was the impetus for starting CN recently reshaped its IT the project and what are its goals? organization. What is new? We started our predictive analytics initiatives last CN IT is currently in the midst of a huge fall that was initiated with a huge pull from the transformation where the ultimate goal is to business. The focus is preventative maintenance— plan and build a solid foundation that will helping prevent track or car failures, for example. support the railway’s evolution. To keep pace The initiative is broken into two segments— with the company’s strategic agenda we are in engineering or fxed items like bridges, tracks the process of improving how we work as an IT and crossings; and mechanical or rolling items function. As part of that, we redefned our BI like locomotives and cars. We spend billions Strategy, within which we strongly highlighted annually on maintenance so there is a tremendous the need to have the ability to serve data much opportunity for improved safety as well as cost faster for analysis, ad-hoc or discovery purposes, reductions. without jeopardizing our long term enterprise informational ecosystem. What have been your experiences To aid in delivering its BI initiatives, CN and results with WhereScape? introduced automated and iterative rapid prototyping capabilities from WhereScape It is very diffcult to defne requirements within its agile methodology which enabled a early on—but with WhereScape we spec out revolutionary game changing approach to our requirements much quicker and earlier. In development. Classic ETL development as we addition, our sandbox environment is very easy know it is dead. to evolve and change—our overall development What has been your approach to lifecycle is managed more quickly overall and delivering results to the business? more effciently.

In every organization, the reality is we are all In one of our initiatives, after using WhereScape facing various degrees of Shadow IT within the RED for just one week, we had integrated multiple business units who are driven to deliver point data sources, had Tableau working on top of it, and

www.wherescape.com - 2 - Customer Case Study

were showing business users a demo with actual Any fnal thoughts? CN data in a very iterative development approach. The ability to iterate—delivering close to what the business is looking for, delivering the fndings and The prototype and iterate approach using then iterate again, engages everybody in IT and WhereScape’s data warehouse automation the business and enables us to react very quickly platform is working incredibly well at CN, and respond to the business exponentially faster. dramatically aiding and increasing the delivery velocity and clarity in the early phases of our agile During one working session, a business user process. Our approach is to prototype frst, get it asked for data that we found required a 10 million right, then build the enterprise solution with the row abstract. Once we got that data extract, we specs and documentation WhereScape provides. provided the new iteration the next day—we just Going from waterfall to agile is one thing, but simply changed the model, hit the ‘big red’ button, using WhereScape’s rapid, iterative prototyping and WhereScape regenerated the data structures capabilities with agile is really a quantum leap and populated it. The ability to meet with the forward--from evolutionary to revolutionary, if business and provide an update version for review you will. This more timely access to data will the next day is a game changer for us and has enable CN to further improve customer service helped us regain the trust of our business users as and safety. well as react very quickly and respond to changing business conditions. On one recent project, we had fve cycles—or iterations—in one day. WhereScape RED enables us to get our sandbox and prototyping solutions right very early in the development process. ‘Good enough’ is not good enough anymore.

www.wherescape.com

Version 02 Version - 3 -